3rd step also includes political instability in China, an even riskier business environment, demographic headwinds along with rising wages and increased fixed automation costs everywhere. Globalization, once "inevitable", has been dead since 2019 and isn't coming back in the foreseeable future.
What happened in 2019 that caused globalisation to die? I remember the first volleys against it being the onset of the pandemic and border tightenings in Feb/Mar 2020. In 2019, COVID-19 still seemed like it might be a local phenomenon and most people outside of China had barely any idea that it existed.
2018 and 2019 saw increasing levels of tariffs apply to Chinese goods, all to force China into signing an FTA deal that never really got off the ground (and, IMHO, would never be fully adhered to by the Chinese side).
You made race a part of the subject when discussing Albright. You were likely called out for disingenuous "race-baiting" since you don't provide any evidence for her animus against "brown people", a questionable claim because even if true it's not clear that Iraqis identify as "brown people" or Madeleine thinks in those terms.
Moreover, you ignore the the actual war she was more famous for and had a bigger role in, "Madeleine's War" (https://edition.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/time/1999/05/10/albright...). This involved her advocating (successfully) to bomb Serbia, a nation of nominally white Christian people she argued were committing genocide against a Muslim (also white) population. This was also against the UN charter due to Russian and Chinese veto. This war, more so than the Iraq war, has much more relevance in discussing her legacy today given the invasion of Ukraine but you appear to ignore it intentionally or are perhaps unaware of it entirely.
I'm not arguing that racism isn't important in understanding the Iraq war (or other wars), but it is one factor among many. Some of the most brutal wars are actually between groups of people that to outsiders appear to be be very similar (Ukraine/Russia, Serb/Croat, various civil wars, etc...)
No I did not. I am not the original person making the comment.
Just because she bombed white people to protect white people doesn’t mean she was somehow completely objective and unaffected by questions of race in her decision making. That is absolutely ridiculous. No one is.
I agree with the gist of what you write, but I think your text below (although correct) is misleading.
"But that's not what's happening across the Western democracies."
Western democracies do indeed have poor social reproduction, but I do NOT believe "Western" or democracy is the driving factor. If anything, your statement understates the issue because below replacement fertility rates are rapidly expanding and by no means restricted to the West or to democracies. See:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
There are ~ 90 countries where fertility is below replacement including disparate non-Western countries like UAE, China, South Korea, Malaysia, Mauritius, Nepal, Lebanon, etc... including those that are not democratic.
Yes, I'm worried that until it gets significant traction outside Taiwan, it is vulnerable to the political fortunes there... Wider participation in the project would be very beneficial, now and in any darker future. Would love to see update even at the municipal level overseas.
The article was about fungal infections, not bacterial infections. In both cases the amount of both antibiotics and anti-fungals used by humans is small relative to their use in agriculture. That may be an easier place to start, although it doesn't preclude sanction against whatever bad practices are described in your linked video (didn't watch).
The video is about effluents form the pharma industry. The scale dwarfs any abuse by both human patients and animal farming. I have modified my comment above because I had used the wrong word.
The only effective way to reduce use of anti-fungals in agriculture is to develop new resistant varieties of plants, but that is sadly blocked by people unreasonably fearing gmo.
"The problem is that the racial distribution of those students who are good at math upsets the blank slate world-view of the teachers"
Do you have any evidence that teachers are more likely to hold blank slate world-views? I've met very few people who believe this, and teachers don't seem any more likely to me to hold these views.
"notion that some students are smarter than others and that these discrepencies have consistent ethnic patterns fills them with a lot of rage due to their politics/religion."
Well, I do feel somewhat enraged reading these types of statements because it is wrong and harmful. I also say this as someone without a "blank slate world-view" (I've a background in genetics) and as a teacher.
You're statement is wrong because:
1) Race is a nebulous political construct not consistent over time and space
2) Observed racial differences are context dependent and also not consistent over time and space
You cite "Asians" as outperforming other groups (presumably in school in the West?) as one of your "consistent" ethnic patterns. But on closer inspection it is nothing but artifact of cherry-picking results that fit your hypothesis. Another time and place and you may get totally different results - and only one example is sufficient to prove your "consistent" hypothesis wrong. In fact, you pointed out yourself that performance has changed in the US and various European countries, undercutting your whole point on consistent racial differences! Probably if we go back to the period of European colonialism the difference is even more stark, but that is also cherry picking history... If we go back 3000 years, Europe is a poorly educated backwater relative to Egypt or the Middle East.
Group math educational attainment has far more to do with social context and history than "racial distribution of those students who are good at math". It's why relatively recent Asian immigration from say China for scientific and technical jobs is likely to produce kids who are good at math, but the same out-performance in not seen in say, Hmong refugees from Vietnam.
Also, AFAIK Asian kids don't currently outperform all other ethnic groups in the United States in educational attainment - I believe that honor now goes to Nigerian kids. Does that fit your world-view?
"Taiwan and China are under no such illusions. They are happy to identify smart students and give them challenging topics in order to help them achieve their potential, rather than trying to slow down the best students in order to pretend that everyone has the same talent for math. "
Right, because teachers don't try to help students reach their potential and try to slow down great students?! Students can't skip grades, take AP classes or graduate college early?! A teacher giving everyone in the course the same math homework or test is pretending everyone has the same talent for math?!
"At the risk of sounding racist, Asian culture respect their commons to a significantly larger degree than non-Asian cultures."
Your gross-generalization is so poorly constructed it's hard for it to be wrong, never mind right. So I'll ask you a few questions instead.
How would you even begin to test your claim in a realistic way? What time period/s would you select? Even if it were true, would it matter? Would efforts to solve these problems best be dealt with government policy/funding/enforcement or by pushing "Asian culture" in Europe or Africa?
Do you really mean East Asia? Does Bangkok, New Delhi and Manila count as Asian? Does a skyscraper in the Philippines surrounded by gangs, illegal trade and graffiti not count if it is made of garbage (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Mountain)? What if it was closed and re-opened elsewhere, does that mean the culture changed twice?
Is your generalization "significant" in understanding why Tokyo is cleaner than New Delhi or Bangkok or why Toronto has fewer youth gangs than New York? Was their "respect" for "the commons" in Singapore in 1964 when youth gangs and others engaged in race warfare? Or is it just more respect for the commons now that Singapore is no longer part of Malaysia?
How does a communal "respecting their commons" work when most people in a society think it is okay to conduct trade in ivory or whales, that are illegal under international law? What about dumping plastic in the ocean, where Asia in the main source? Or does the "commons" not count if it refers to the rest of the world? Perhaps how much money a society has to clean up pollution is more predictive than culture? Maybe individualism is useful when an entire society needs to change in some fashion and perhaps less useful when norms are reasonable?
Is there a chance that you are bothered by the problems you cite, but find it convenient to say "culture" because it allows you to wash your hands of these problems?
"the entire world stopped using dairy and beef, the cow as we know it would quickly go extinct"
Lots of animals are not used for meat and dairy and are not extinct. Sure, numbers of cows would be massively reduced but that also frees up pasture. Pasture could be converted to habitat for wildlife and support a more diverse set of species.
I can only speak for myself, but I don't care if the number of cattle are reduced to a tiny fraction of the population they once were, if it means more biodiversity.
No credibility. In this poorly written paper the only interesting claim he cites is that some portion of SARS-Cov-2 looks like a "vector" sequence, but it's really just looking like a naturally occurring coronavirus and he confuses plasmid vs a vector. See: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/22221751.2020.1...
Just because the Chinese government lies a lot, it doesn't mean they are lying about this. There is no need.
